Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain (review)

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America weaves its analysis around a dizzying scope of archival materials, including the four-hundred-year repertoire of the ballad "Babes in the Wood"; letters written by nineteenth-century Cherokee students; paper dolls; children's marginal notes in their beloved books; tales of children bought, sold, and kidnapped; and bedtime stories, among many other artifacts. Crain joins together these seemingly disparate texts with a simple question: what has been the relationship between childhood and reading in the American past? The answer unfolds through investigation of sites of reading along the "long and complex modern history" of American childhood during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1), revealing that though the image of a child immersed in her book is a common and beloved icon in American culture, this nostalgic idea of childhood reading comes from a long history of reading practices that tie irrevocably together the child, her book, and concepts of self-ownership, property, imaginative self-loss, and commercial worth.

Crain's first chapter and introduction juxtapose two very different pictures of child reading: The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), about the eponymous girl whose rise to literacy restores her lost fortune, and Jessie Willcox Smith's illustration for "Picture Books in Winter," which features the familiar image of a child on a window seat imaginatively lost in a book. The contrast between these two pieces reflects differing conceptions of child literacy, which respectively present a child who uses literacy as a route to self-possession and a child who loses herself in the act of reading. Reading Children is the story of these contrasts, of how ties between childhood and reading shift from a route to self-possession in the antebellum era to a pleasurable "self-loss or self-forgetting or a self-dispossession" at the turn of the twentieth century (7; original emphasis). The shift is a subtle one that Crain elucidates through deft close reading of her expansive archive.

This exploration then begins with an analysis of two texts that persist in American culture through a series of retellings and adaptations: The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes and the transatlantic ballad "Babes in the Wood." Crain argues that Goody Two-Shoes' literary self-possession demonstrates that literacy in the antebellum era became a kind of "inalienable property" that extended even "to the smallest orphan girl," should she learn to read, implying a "Lockean self-possession for children across ranks and classes" (37, 6). Versions of "Babes in the Wood" produced between the 1830s and '40s likewise "underscore[d] a futurity that relies not on inherited family property but on the internal property of literacy" (52). While these stories of literarily self-possessed children work as a kind of cultural starting point, Crain traces the "afterlives" of both tales in later retellings to show how the connections between childhood and reading shift and change with time (38). Crain demonstrates that as Goody's story is retold throughout the nineteenth century, Goody "becom[es] a meme and a brand, evacuated of her political and narrative complexity" so that "[t]he narrative that promoted alphabetic literacy as a form of internalized property … soon lost its urgency, becoming a souvenir of a fairy-tale past" (38).

Crain further examines changes to this literarily self-possessed child in her third chapter, in which she shows how Joseph Lancaster's model of education, popular in early- to mid-nineteenth-century America, promised not self-ownership and financial independence to "at risk" children who participated in his brand of schooling, but instead "wholesale acculturation and social control at discount prices" (60, 65). Studying Lancasterian schooling methods, processes of renaming Cherokee children who took part in these systems of education, and letters by renamed Cherokee girls, "Colonizing Childhood, Placing Cherokee Children" is the chapter upon which the book turns. Crain looks to these materials to...